Search and rescue teams during the Hawaii wildfires, August 2023. (Dominick Del Vecchio/ United States Department of Homeland Security/ Wikipedia)

🌡World in ‘unknown territory’ after heat records, says head of UN’s climate body. Jim Skea, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, said he was surprised that temperatures had breached the 1.5°C limit over the last year and that more science was needed to understand the occurrence.

💸US pause on funding UN's main Palestinian relief agency may become permanent. Bipartisan opposition in US Congress to resuming funding for UNRWA, suspended over allegations against its staff, may cause the UN agency to lose its biggest donor.

🫕 Ex-ambassador Georges Martin: 'Switzerland seems to have fallen off the radar'. The retired Swiss diplomat, who recently published a memoir, disapproves of the direction Swiss diplomacy has taken and deplores what he sees as the forsaking of "traditional neutrality".

🧸Early childhood mortality reaches historic low. The number of children who died before their fifth birthday dropped to 2.9 million in 2022, according to a joint report by Unicef, WHO and the World Bank.

🥣Growth of gulf between rich and poor countries ‘recipe for much darker future’, says UN. A human development report found that lower-income countries have been struggling more than its wealthier counterparts with the pandemic, conflict, unchecked globalisation and the rise in populism.